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May 22 • 2014
1902410
A
ccording to
Jewish tradition,
the Torah is so
sacred that even a single
error made on a single let-
ter renders the entire scroll
unusable.
And yet the Hebrew
Bible — including the
Torah, its first five books
— is riddled with corrup-
tions and alterations that
have accrued and been
passed down over the mil-
lennia.
Now an international
team of scholars is working
to fix all that.
For the past 14 years, the
team behind The Hebrew
Bible: A Critical Edition
(HBCE) has been laboring
on a project to sift through
the text and reverse the
accumulated imperfections
and changes, returning the
books of the Hebrew Bible
to something like their original ver-
sions. The first volume is due later
this year.
"It is a little chutzpadik," acknowl-
edged Ronald Hendel, HBCE's gen-
eral editor and a professor of Hebrew
Bible at the University of California,
Berkeley.
It's also a messy, painstaking and
controversial endeavor that has been
criticized by some of the world's
leading biblical scholars. The critics
argue that what Hendel and his team
are attempting to do is misleading,
counterproductive or flat-out impos-
sible.
"I think it will actually end
up causing more problems," said
Michael Segal, a senior lecturer in
Bible at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem.
The difficulties in the project
stem from the Bible's long history of
transmission from scribe to scribe
through the centuries. HBCE is try-
ing to reverse engineer that process,
to sift through the various extant
texts of the Bible and — by analyz-
ing grammatical glitches, stylistic
hitches and contradictions of the
texts — establish a reading closer to
A Torah scroll
if not the original, then at least the
archetype on which the subsequent
copies were based.
The goal is to rewind the clock as
far as possible toward the time when
the various biblical texts attained
their canonical form, around the
start of the Common Era.
The text of the Hebrew Bible now
being used descends from what is
called the Masoretic text, which
was assembled between the 6th and
10th centuries by Jewish scribes and
scholars in present-day Israel and
Iraq. But even among the various
versions of the Masoretic text there
are subtle differences.
Many of today's printings of the
Hebrew Bible come from the Second
Rabbinic Bible, a text assembled in
16th-century Venice. The Jewish
Publication Society uses the
Leningrad Codex, which at approxi-
mately 1,000 years old is the oldest
complete surviving text. Still others
use the 10th-century Aleppo Codex,
which the Torah scholar Maimonides
praised for its accuracy but has been
missing much of the Torah since a
1947 fire.